Climate change costings that don't count the cost of inaction are worthless

Just seven months ago the United Nations told the world that we have 12 years to limit the climate change catastrophe. It means that to keep global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels we need to cut carbon pollution by 45% by 2030 and down to zero by 2050. Twelve years. Actually scratch that – now it is 11 years.

Now ask yourself how often that has been raised during this election campaign?

At the time a co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on impacts of climate change said: “It’s a line in the sand and what it says to our species is that this is the moment and we must act now. This is the largest clarion bell from the science community and I hope it mobilises people and dents the mood of complacency.”

At the start of the 2019 federal election campaign Scott Morrison put out a video where he was all dewy-eyed about the future, saying “the next 10 years are important to everybody at every stage of life”.

And yet not once – NOT ONCE – did he mention that the UN has given us 11 years to do something about a global catastrophe.

No, instead it’s all standard of living and nothingness statements that would get shot down by any decent advertising firm in the first meeting.

He did say one thing that is correct. He noted that “the decisions you make in one term of government last for a decade or more”. And in no area is this more true than with climate change. Every year we do less than enough, the ability to limit damage becomes less and the cost of doing so becomes larger.

I’ve written in the past how climate change has destroyed the minds of conservatives. But it has also destroyed the media model that seemed to work so well for holding politicians to account: the model of balance and impartiality, where journalists who strive to be seen to take no sides and have no bias.

Over the past 30 years the conservative side has become hostage to cranks and charlatans

It’s a model that only holds up so long as both sides are open to reality because it implicitly gives credibility to both sides.

But over the past 30 years the conservative side has become hostage to cranks and charlatans. And as the conservatives lurched ever more towards lunacy the media has for the most part followed.

It has led us to a position where the Liberal party’s utterly pathetic climate change policy is given credence. And where the big issue about the ALP’s less-worse policy is the cost, not from the point of view that it could be achieved with a more efficient price on carbon but that it costs more than does the LNP’s nothing policy.

It is a position where editors give front-page space to modelling so redolent with bias that you can practically smell the coal dust on its pages.

It has meant those wishing to actually do something about climate change have to not just argue their policy is better, but that the need for the policy is there.

Election campaigns are often about costs – how much will your healthcare or education policy cost? But we do not as a rule talk costs to the economy, because such modelling is pretty nebulous and is reliant on assumptions that can distort any picture for better or worse.

That does not render modelling irrelevant, but it means it is no fact check.

And with climate change any costings that do not count the costs of inaction are worthless.

It would be like doing a costing of investing in the polio vaccine in the 1940s and not considering the cost of people continuing to die and suffer from polio. Clearly the costs of inaction massively outweigh the cost of acting.

The good news is we do have some research on the costs, because while in Australia we allow political parties to indulge the equivalent of arguing over which rat in a restaurant kitchen has the fewest number of fleas, in the UK things are rather more mature.

In what should be a siren for all journalists, they note that “the costs of the low-carbon transition are critically dependent on the quality as well as the stringency of public policy”.

Note the issue is quality of the policy, not whether or not there is some precise hit to GDP they can come up with.

And what is quality? Policy with “long-term clarity on the regulatory landscape, prioritisation of the role of markets, and policy processes that are transparent, predictable, and based on cost-benefit analysis”.

And for it to be successful “it will also need to be credible (actors must believe the government means what it says), consistent across time and governments, and across different policy sectors, and yet adaptive to new circumstances”.

In other words: Tony Abbott and his ilk – your time is done.

The report also notes that “the very word ‘costs’ to describe decarbonisation expenditures is somewhat misleading, because in a very real sense such expenditures are also investments”. What’s more, it suggests “the correct answer to the question ‘what will it cost?’” is that it depends on “what is done now”.

Wait and it costs more; do it poorly now and it costs more; accept that a policy to reduce emissions by 26% including dodgy accounting as legitimate, and it will cost more.

And if you really are worried about economic growth the report also concludes that “there has been no appreciable difference in rates of economic growth between those countries that have reduced emissions substantially and those that have not”. But importantly, “yet the former camp are arguably in a stronger position to benefit from a global transition to a zero carbon economy in years to come”.

The report makes clear it is time to stop giving credence to cranks and demand better of our political parties – and there is no excuse for the media either.

We need at a minimum a 45% reduction by 2030 and to get to zero net emission by 2050. So parties need to explain what they are going to do to get there and argue why their way is best.

If a party is not even willing to come up with such a path then do not treat them with the respect that “balance” gives them.